Star Trek (2009).
After recent news I thought I would give it another spin to see if I was talking out of my arse about it not being all that.
Upon reflection it's not as bad as I remembered it.
The Kobayashi Maru scene is more of a spoof of the event as described in TWOK and is an early blip, as is Sulu leaving the breaks off but the film rattles along at a fair pace and the actors invest the characters with personality (though hopefully Chekov will have less of a comedy accent in future episodes).
It only really falls apart when Young Spock drops Kirk off on the Ice Moon of Frigia/Hoth/Psi 2000.
Nimoy's infodump, the tedious scenes with Nero and the leaping from platform to plaform still grind.
Also Simon Pegg was a big mistake for Scotty.
Paul McGillion should have got the job.
Deep Roy as the mute Walnut guy Jar-Jarred the emotion out of Vulcan's destruction.
I really wanted the Enterprise to fall into the Black Hole and come out in the prime Star Trek universe but Lost In Spaaaaaace.
3 'Photons'.
Next up was Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes (2011).
A film of two halves one of which was totally redundant the other rather good actually.
The apes in this film are the stars. The humans were wasted or plain awful.
There is a thread over on the Star Wars discussion boards about what Hayden would have been without Anakin.
James Franco out planks Hayden in this film.
The camera hates him, he is as emotionally engaging as a thimble of sand and his character could easily be left on the cutting room floor.
Freida Pinto is prettier and smiles with conviction but in every other respect has as less of a right to be there than Franco.
Tom Felton should have done something different after Potter instead of playing a pantomime nasty person with a fizzing taser wand.
David Oyelowo wins the award for the most pants unsympathetic character in any film of this kind.
David Hewlett plays a terribly hamfisted creation. He would stick out as being annoyingly cartoonish even in a Resident Evil movie.
John Lithgow is nice as always but isn't in the film enough and doesn't do enough to save the human side of this film.
Brian Cox literally spends the film sitting near a door (presumably waiting for the paycheck to arrive).
Patrick Doyle's score is obvious and dull not a patch on Goldsmith's or Elfman's.
When the apes rise it's a bit crap that they leap around San Fran pointedly avoiding killing people while wrecking everything in sight.
But the section in the holding cells is a revelation.
It deserves to be in a separate film.
After a while I began to forget it was CGI and the ape characters without any dialogue conveyed more variety and human warmth than any of the human characters (Lithgow aside).
I could easily have watched a feature length presentation with just those characters with perhaps the occasional doping up from a faceless human resulting in their growing intelligence and eventual escape.
What we have here is a bizarre Harvey Dent of a film which on one side is fantastic and the other side actually worse than Tim Burton's film.
Watching it made me love Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes even more.
Now there were humans you could love and hate and laugh at.
Ape Story (Enhanced)/Human story (Gelded).